Monday, February 8, 2010

Down With States!

Lots of leftybloggers I agree with have been railing against the evils of the Senate. But I want to do them one better and argue against the existence of states.

If we didn't have them, we'd laugh at the idea that state boundaries should be drawn where they are. Who would look at New York and decide that New York City needs to be in the same political body with all that other stuff? Apparently back in the old days, the whole state was economically integrated by the Erie Canal, which I guess will impress all the mule owners reading this blog.

And you know the old line about Pennsylvania -- Philly on one side, Pittsburgh on the other, and Alabama in the middle. Why do these disparate regions need to all be part of one unit? It's kind of like those African countries where the borders were drawn by European colonial powers to go along rivers that didn't exist, putting tribes that hated each other into the same country.

I don't see any sort of public administration that regions of this kind are good at handling. You need local government to run schools and police departments and sewer systems. You need federal government to run the military and social insurance programs that operate best with national risk pooling. What do states do that local and federal government can't?

Plus, you get rid of states, and you get rid of all the problems with the Senate.

who we are

Nicholas Beaudrot is an accidental political observer living in Seattle, Washington. By day he writes software for Amazon.com, snowboards, and plays ultimate frisbee. By night [and morn] he posts to this blog, runs the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally, and tries to cook decent Italian cuisine. A graduate of Brown University with a joint degree in Mathematics-Computer Science, in late 2003 Nicholas felt the urge to put his knack with numbers towards a greater social purpose than winning his fantasy baseball league or taking up poker, perhaps in an act of penance for not voting in 2000. He has been spotted standing in line for Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, on the Atlanta area quiz bowl program "Hi-Q", and as a young boy in national broadcasts of the Christmas Eve service at the Cathedral of Saint Philip. If you play Halo 3, Team Fortress II, Rock Band 2, Catan, or a number of other games, he's on Xbox live as niq24601.

Neil Sinhababu is a philosophy professor at the National University of Singapore. It's a tropical island with good public transit and they're very nice about not caning him. He's fond of red-state college towns like Austin, where he got his PhD. Much of his research is in ethics — hence his alias "Neil the Ethical Werewolf," which contains the name of his philosophy blog. He has also published on Nietzsche and on how to have a girlfriend in another universe. His utilitarianism shapes his goals and tactical views, and makes it impossible for him to stay away from politics. At Harvard, he won a student government election by eating fire in each dorm room in his district. He'd be happy to use this skill to help Democrats in tough races. He likes drinking with smart people and dancing in altogether ridiculous ways. At his last project, War or Car, he showed that you could buy each US household a Prius or each panda a stealth bomber for the price of the Iraq War.